Posted
by
kdawson
on Wednesday January 20, 2010 @03:04AM
from the making-lawyers'-eyes-roll dept.

spagiola passes along a New York Times piece on the copyright travails of Sherlock Holmes. "At his age [123 years], Holmes would logically seem to have entered the public domain. But not only is the character still under copyright in the United States, for nearly 80 years he has also been caught in a web of ownership issues so tangled that Professor Moriarty wouldn't have wished them upon him."

Arthur Conan Doyle never wrote [snopes.com] "Elementary, my dear Watson". Perhaps it derives from some derived work, and any extant copyright claim to the phrase rests in the hands of some other estate.

A third major reference is the oft-quoted but non-canonical phrase: "Elementary, my dear Watson." This phrase was never actually said by Holmes, since it does not appear in any of the sixty Holmes stories written by Conan Doyle.

if you can milk something infinately, it removes all incentive to create new creative works, completely undermining the whole arguement for copyright in the first place. how does this simple fact fail with law makers?

It doesn't fail with them. They just don't care. They get paid to write more long-lasting, restrictive copyright laws, so they do it. All those "for the good of culture" arguments are just smokes and mirrors, so it's less obvious.

Yup. In fact, copyright in itself is self defeating as any increase in actual information produced is offset by the loss of actual copies of said information due to higher copying costs.

To be fair, that is not 100% true. If the extra information produced is of higher quality it can still be worth it. But that is pretty much the only situation where copyright can be motivated. However, in that case, I don't really see any evidence for copyright beyond 5 years, as quality information should have no problem earning back its money in that amount of time. And allowing non-quality information to profit from copyright laws is inefficient.

Holmes, in the country of his birth (Britain), has been public domain for TWENTY YEARS.Holmes, in the US and thanks to our fucked up laws [cornell.edu] passed by paid-off, bribed, and otherwise corrupt legislators, is covered by "copyright" law in the US all the way until 2023. At which time the character will be 136 years old.

Keep in mind that the NORMAL term of our fucked-up copyright laws is supposed to be either 95 years for "works for hire" (bought and paid for by hookers sent to legislators courtesy of Disney Corp and Sonny Bono's widow), or "Death of the author plus 70 years", which means the copyright on all of Conan Doyle's Holmes stories should have passed into public domain in the US back in 2000 (Sir Artie died in 1930). Actually, they should have passed back in 1980 (and did), but every time it gets close, Disney sends another round of hookers and bags of cash to Congress to buy another extension [techdirt.com].

According to US copyright law and Project Gutenberg, the original Sherlock Holmes stories are in the public domain. This means that the original form of the character is available for re-presentation and re-imagining. Now, it may be that there is some later, more potent version of Sherlock Holmes that is still copyright protected. Certainly all of the movies are. But the original stories, and the ability to create derivatives of the original character as written, that's no longer locked up. The Times article is not clear on what's protected and what's not. It's not like for a continuum of works there's simply an on/off switch, protected/not protected.

Because the law doesn't say copyrights are eternal. Therefore you cannot milk something indefinitely.

If I passed a law that said copyrights now last 10^100 years our cowards on the Supreme Court would still say it was constitutional because it fit the definition of 'limited time'. even if that time would be some time after the heat death of the freaking universe.

No. It wasn’t. Look at the word. It says copyright. The right to copy. To reproduce the work.It has nothing to do with creativity or art. It has to do with publishers and money.

What you mean, is the author’s right.Which, from what I heard, is nearly meaningless in the USA. Right?

In Germany we have the Urheberrecht instead of the copyright. The Urheberrecht (literally “originator’s right”) is the right of the one who created the work. And it can’t be given away. Ever. (The rule is, that if you’re payed by the hour, the payer is the originator. If you’re payed all at once, you are.)Which is pretty nice.

Nowadays, nobody needs publishers anymore. So they are clinging to the last twig they still got: Extending copyright as far as possible. Like with this thing here. If your life would depend on it, you’d do the same. It always gets looong and weird at the end.But I don’t worry, since it’s impossible to keep this going forever. Sooner or later, there is no art and no artist left. New artists already couldn’t care less about them. And there will be a time, where their extensions will become just so silly, that everybody stops taking them seriously.

Copyright laws were made at first because publishers made copies of authors' works without their consent or giving them compensation. The idea was to give authors control for a time to allow them to profit from it and thereby encourage more creative works. That's been twisted now of course but that was the idea at the time.

Because it doesn't. I don't have anything I can milk indefinitely so the incentive to me to create new works appear to be higher because i would then be able to milk my product for the rest of my life. For someone who already owns something they can milk indefinitely the incentive is still there because even rich people want to get richer.

Logically, by making the reward massive (infinite copyright), the incentive also becomes massive.

if you can milk something infinately, it removes all incentive to create new creative works

Sherlock Holmes is a piss-poor example for this argument.

The character is arguably the most famous and instantly recognizable in all English literature.

There have been hundreds if not thousands of new Holmes stories published. Countless books, films, stage, radio and tv productions. In each generation, a new actor becomes the definitive Sherlock Holmes.

There have puppet shows, comics, cartoons, graphic novels - Dover even publishes a set of paper dolls.

The modern mystery and detective story begins with Holmes. Doyle introduced three important and suggestive ideas:

1 Holmes is a private detective, in the modern meaning of the word.He is almost never reduced to solving a problem with a fist or a gun, I don't think of how fresh and novel that was.

2 Doyle separated the narrator and the detective.

Watson can tell the story in the first person without cheating the reader.

He can ask the questions the reader wants answered. He can be an Archie Goodwin or a Nora Charles.

2 Holmes is firmly anchored in a particular time and place - a time and place he instantly invokes.

Putting fences in imaginationland should be against human rights. You aren't just avoiding working on some particular character or environment, but in anything similar "enough". And you could had a new/good idea about something existing already.

Derivative works are also creative, the kind of creativity that don't need so much the world building and background explaining as was being done in the original work and focus in the story itself, but it still could be something great, maybe even greater than the

Well, except for the fact the article is wrong on several accounts and so are the heirs, interesting article.

First, it was the 1997 Sono Bono copyright act that extended the copyright for the single Sherlock Holmes book published after 1922, but the rmaining Sherlock Holmes books have long ago entered the public domain. Therefore the character is public domain, but no derivative work based on the 1927 Sherlock Holmes book can be made until 2017.
But don't take my word for it, see for yourself at gutenberg. [gutenberg.org]

You can blame Disney and their rodent for the current state of copyright laws. Don't think that when copyright period for Mickey once again draws to a close there won't be a large bundle of cash handed out to the nearest person able to extend the period another 20-50 years.

You can blame Disney and their rodent for the current state of copyright laws. Don't think that when copyright period for Mickey once again draws to a close there won't be a large bundle of cash handed out to the nearest person able to extend the period another 20-50 years.

One way to stop this would be to turn Mickey into an pop culture symbol for a pedophile or terrorist...

Degrade the icon to the point where Disney would rather wash their hands of the rodent.

What I hate is arguments that if the copyright is allowed to lapse that anyone will be able to create whatever derivative they want and sell them as legit. I've had educated people try to tell my that copyright is keeping Mickey Mouse porn from being sold at Walmart. Talk about a basic misunderstanding. This is the exact bullshit that lets them get away with extending copyrights over and over.
I still think the easiest system is to charge a yearly fee that starts off at $1 for the first year and doubles ea

As much as the current state of the copyright law and the public domain pisses me off, I can't help but laugh at the rationale that was presented when they extended copyright from life of the author plus 50 years to plus 70 years. They really did argue that it was necessary as an incentive for artists to produce—it wouldn't be worth it to do the work if their heirs couldn't benefit from the work that long.

So, a bunch of lobbyists explained, with straight faces, to some congresspeople—who then we

Which makes Disney the worst kind of hypocrite, since they've built their empire on public domain works, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Pinocchio (1940) to The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and Rapunzel (later this year) and many others in between. Over 70 years of taking from the public domain and what have they given back? NOTHING. Fuckers.

I don't see why not, and copyrights can certainly be transferred. The screwed-up bit, in my opinion, is this:

In 1980 Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle’s other works entered the public domain in Britain. In America the passage of the Copyright Act of 1976 gave an author or his heirs a chance to recapture lost rights; Conan Doyle’s daughter, Jean, did so in 1981.

So here in Britain they would appear to be in the public domain, as one would expect, but in the US his daughter was given the chance to say "no, actually, I'd like to keep the copyright for longer please"? Or am I misunderstanding that paragraph?

This reminds me of the Smiley Face trademark [guardian.co.uk] escapades. The posters for the Watchmen movie were different depending on the country. There was also an issue with Wal-Mart using it, apparently [nytimes.com].

In America the passage of the Copyright Act of 1976 gave an author or his heirs a chance to recapture lost rights; Conan Doyle's daughter, Jean, did so in 1981.

Yes, and it's a travesty. The heirs of Jack Kirby are using it in an attempt to steal dozens of characters that Kirby helped create while at Marvel back in the 60's, and the heirs of Siegal used it to reclaim the character of Superboy from DC. It is going to happen a LOT in the upcoming decade.

Maybe that's not a bad thing, if it gets used against some big studios maybe they'll be able to do something about getting it reversed - they certainly have deeper pockets/more immediate vested interest than the average Joe.

The only reason to extend after the death is to ensure that the husband/wife receives a pension and the children are supported until they can start working by themselves. For the first part, 70 years is most likely a bit excessive for most cases, and for the second case definitely excessive. How about: lifetime of spouse or until the youngest child is 25 years, whichever is greater. This may be difficult to administer, in that case, just make it 25 years after death and you have covered it in 95% of all cas

Huh? What's so special about an author, that they get life insurance for free? Everyone else has to pay for that sort of guarantee for our dependants. Copyright should be a fixed term, regardless of the mortal status of the author.

I am not defending it, I am just simply saying that those reasons are basically the only ones that hold at all for having copyright extended after the death of an author.
I do agree with you, but if you want to reform the copyright system you need to come up with ideas that can gain acceptance from more than the slashdot readers. Saying 25 years with the motivation that it covers the children until they start working is pragmatic in the sense that it would be possible to accept it, even for the copyright m

I do agree with you, but if you want to reform the copyright system you need to come up with ideas that can gain acceptance from more than the slashdot readers.

Given that content consumers significantly outnumber content producers, I don't think getting wide acceptance for significantly reduced copyright terms (or any other similar scheme; my favorite is unlimited term, but with a fee required to sustain copyright after an initial period of a few years, growing linearly as time passes) would pose a problem.

Huh? What's so special about an author, that they get life insurance for free? Everyone else has to pay for that sort of guarantee for our dependants.

You get paid in real time. Do a month's work, get a month's pay, set some aside for life insurance or pension. An author is more like a long-term investor. They put in a lot of work up front and their rewards come in over years, sometimes decades. If you write a novel, die, and then a year later it gets its second larger print run after good reviews / word of mouth, or it gets bought for turning into a film, or whatever, your widow would get nothing to represent the value of the work. That's why copyright projects forwards in time, because the earnings project forward in time. What, if your partner invests all their hours and money into long-term stocks, you don't get the earnings back from that because they died?

Also, it reduces the incentive for movie producers to kill you so they can use your work for free.;)

If you write a novel, die, and then a year later it gets its second larger print run after good reviews / word of mouth, or it gets bought for turning into a film, or whatever, your widow would get nothing to represent the value of the work.

Huh? Of course she does. I didn't say copyrights should expire on death - I said they should extend a fixed term. All other things being equal, your widow would get exactly what she would of got from that work had you lived out the entire term.

Nope. Actually fixed term copyrights are the best countermeasure against "incentive for movie producers to kill you so they can use your work for free".
If the copyright is fixed at 70 years after publication, then nobody cares you are alive or dead. If the copyright is your life + 70 years, then there is a higher incentive to kill you to get the work in the public domain ASAP.
BTW this extreme privileges that writers, singers and actors get. Painters and sculpturers never had those, and are now fighting to have a cut of their work's re-sales.

In that case, they should either work for a salary for a book investment company or run their own company (which again needs investment of some kind). That is how business usually works. Not being able to collect a steady salary is something any upstart entrepreneur without backing has to deal with. There is nothing special about authors there.

They put in a lot of work up front and their rewards come in over years, sometimes decades

You will find very few cases were you don't have have an 80-20 distribution with the 80% being in the first 5 years. Small enough percentage that we shouldn't worry a

Out of curiosity, do you see a difference between copyright and shares in a company?

The shares of a company that no longer provides anything of interest are worthless. The copyright of a story or character that nobody has interest in is worthless.

The owner of the shares doesn't have to do any work, just take the proceeds of the work others do. The shares only exist to make the ownership clear. Copyright holders also don't have to do any work, just take the proceeds of the work others do (via licensing etc..

Why should the commercial copyright part be owned by private people in the first place? The right to be recognized as the creator is one thing. There shouldn't even be a time limit on that one. But the money part? Why is authorship treated so differently from any other type of work?

Mr. Lellenberg said that Sherlock Holmes remains under copyright protection in the United States through 2023, and that any new properties involving the detective “definitely should” be licensed by the Conan Doyle estate. Asked about a recent Red Bull television commercial that features a cartoon Holmes and Watson, Mr. Lellenberg said he had not seen it. “Very interesting,” he said. “News to me.”

He then twirled his mustache, petted the Persian cat on his lap, raised an eyebrow, tilted his head, rubbed his hands together, and said: "release the lawyers!"

So you create copyright works in country A, and when that expires you then renew your copyright in country B? After that expires will they just transfer it yet again to another country and extend it yet again? Since all of these countries have [evil] trade treaties copyright in one is copyright in all....

Copyright is seriously out of control and I point the finger squarely at the US for creating this greedy flawed system...

That was back in the 1800s and VERY different. The current idiocy under that name comes to us directly from the money going into Sonny Bono's pocket, and earlier events of greed and stupidity.Take "Happy Birthday" as an example which has been protected by insane IP laws for years. It didn't suddenly get protected in 1989 did it? 1989 was when the USA enforced their IP stupidity on other places via joining and altering the Berne Convention.

I thought, perhaps wrongly, that the copyright was attached to a particular edition of a book. Therefore, if a book was published separately in the UK and in the USA, I could make a facsimile of the British edition and distribute that in the USA while the American edition was still in copyright. Correct? Wrong? Different rules for images of the pages vs OCR'd text?

The article doesn't explain precisely why it's still under copyright, except that it was renewed in 1981 after falling into the public domain, as permitted by the Copyright Act of 1976. But why hasn't it fallen back into the public domain again? Looking through this chart [cornell.edu], I can't find any combination of circumstances that would allow an 1887 work, whose author died in 1930, to remain in copyright until 2023.

A few of the short stories are still under copyright because they weren't originally published in the US. Nobody owns the characters because they're in the public domain but the person/group who claims to own them (possibly wilfully) doesn't understand this. Guy Ritchie realised it was cheaper to pay them off than to win in court. The journalist doesn't have a clue but figures he can be vague enough and still get a good story.

The rich people used their resources and talents to acquire wealth whereas the poor did nothing to deserve the free money.

I'm a bit confused... how are an author's children, grand-children, and great grand-children any more deserving of this "free money"? They didn't write the book or use their talents to acquire this wealth, one of their ancestor's did.

I do agree an author needs to get paid, otherwise what is to encourage them to write more beyond their personal enjoyment of doing so? However, current copyright is extreme and, if big business has their way, will eventually be extended to infinity and the public domain will

But as an author, if I can't receive remuneration for a work I didn't publish 119 years ago, what's my incentive to continue to write unpublished material? People like you would have us live in an age denuded of ancient, unpublished authors!

The last sherlock holmes story was published in 1927 which would theoretically last under copyright until 2023. But the majority of the stories are pre-1920 and presumably public domain. The post-1923 are also considered the worst according to wikipedia. But mostly in the bookstore you see a large compilation of Sherlock Holmes with every story. To publish every story you'd need to pay a royalty for the 5% still under copyright. The estate charges an inflated amount for this 5% and the publisher pays it since he is spreading the cost over the stories that he doesn't have to strictly pay for.

And consequently (particularly for those making movies) the key characters and associated details remain protected, preventing their use by others. This allows particularly devious estates the option of commissioning new stories with the same characters so as to create all new copyrights for the future (remembering that the plots of stories are not as well protected as the elaborate details that bring them to life).

If IP owners are going to be such absolute children about this, maybe we should revert back to the old law.

It was once legally agreed upon that 14+14 years was an adequate amount of time to commercially exploit your copyright. With today's digital distribution and rapid-fire publishing houses, does it really need to be a HUNDRED years?

Of course the copyright holders want a long copyright not so much so that they can earn money from older works, but to prevent them becoming public domain and diluting the market for new works that they produce. If copyright were 25 years, then all the films, books, music and TV from before 1985 would be available for everyone. I would think that quite a lot of people would be completely happy to spend their leisure time with just that material - it is still within cultural relevance for most people; wherea

My point was that copyright holders keep saying they need these long copyrights as incentives to create new works. However, how much incentive does a 50 year old work give you if it brings in only pocket change every year? If a study proved that a vast majority of works don't bring in a significant amount of money after X years, then copyright holders' main argument for long copyrights would evaporate. For that very reason, I don't expect that they would cooperate with such a study.

Think bigger. The US has a net export of culture (if I may call it that for the sake of the argument) - Disney is one rather marked example, but say Hollywood in general and ignore all other sources of culture for the time being. There's still a metric fuckwad of products out there in the world with Mickey and Donald images on them. Some are even produced by outfits in places where you actually pay royalties. Disney series - even old ones from the 80's - are broadcast in quite a few countries, also generati

"Yes, really, Watson. I'm sure the Traveler will allow us the use of his machine."

"Is there no other way, sir? This seems most excessive..." Watson trailed off, fully aware of the futility in trying to sway Holmes from his conviction. Perhaps Holmes is right. Nip this in the bud while the opportunity still remained.

"Sir, how do you suggest we approach this matter? Surely you cannot expect to drop in from a century in the future and expect tea and scones? The matter of that rather scary looking contraption you wish to employ needs to be addressed as well, sir."

"Quite simple, Watson. I intend that we should mount this "contraption", as you put it, and set the controls to precisely 19 feet in elevation, the corner of Glasshouse and Regent, on the morning of August 16 in the year 1974. Then return." Holmes removed his spectacles and gave them a quick rubbing with the bottom edge of his smoking vest, closely watching Watson from the corner of his eye. The smoke from his pipe cloaked his gaze from Watson.

Watson's eyes glazed slightly as he took in what Holmes had just said. Then they widened. Then they widened more.

"You cannot be serious, sir! You mean to crush Ms. Nina under that contraption?" Watson said, his astonishment tinged with an obvious air of distaste. "Sir, I implore you. Have we really come to this? Time traveling assassins?"

Holmes, more tired then he had ever been in his life, gave Watson a sad, almost regretful smile. "If we are ever to live the life Arthur intended, to solve the riddles that require solving, to live up to our potential, she must die. Then all will be right in the world of Sir Doyle."

Watson, always the one to find some solace in the worst of circumstances, flashed Holmes a quick grin of highly polished teeth. "Can I bring a camera?"

Copyrights are granted as a contract between society and the creator. Society grants protection for an artist's work for a brief time, in return society becomes the benefactor of these works once copyrights elapse. Failure to release works to public domain and instituting new copyright laws to lengthen copyright duration violate this contract, in effect theft of culture.
Copyrights - 7 years.
Patents - 10 years.
Anything more is stealing your culture.

You can Trademark a character, but you can't Copyright him.
You can Copyright "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (which is in the Public Domain), but "Sherlock Holmes" isn't Copyrightable.

Note that much of the Holmes canon is in the Public Domain, since it was originally published in the 19th century. There are only a few Conan Doyle stories (and a great many movies and Holmes stories by other authors) that were Copyrighted late enough to still be under Copyright.

Note also that owning the Trademark for Holmes allows one to play goalkeeper for anyone who wants to do an original Holmes work (and extract money in the process), but it doesn't actually allow one to control the republishing of the original Holmes stories from the 19th Century.

Because this is a typical kdawson article, that in this case picked a New York Times article that was itself also clueless.

Most Holmes stories were published prior to 1923 and are in public domain in the US. The remaining stories are copyrighted, but if you don't use any elements from those copyrighted stories you should be fine, and since they are only a few at the end, it really isn't all that hard not to use anything from those stories. To say that Sherlock Holmes is copyrighted until 2023 is a little misleading--if you want to use material covering his entire Doyle career (his last Doyle story was 1927), then you have to wait until 2023, but you generally won't need to.

So you're another idiot who thinks that since the US is better off financially than all other "1st world nations", we should copy the countries that are worse than us.

We're not better off financially than other first world nations. We're probably worse, thanks to relaxed regulations and regulation enforcement.

"Universal healthcare" is universal theft.

So is inflating prices so you can pay for a staff to handle gross inefficiencies in the medical billing system, so is inflating prices for drugs for the motive of profit.

To "fix healthcare", it is necessary to remove all incentives which make it more expensive than it should be.

* End laws which make employee health insurance an untaxed expense.
* Make possible the purchase of medical insurance across state lines.
* End the absurdly high lawsuit rewards that make insurance for doctors so expensive.
* End the FDA control over medicine approval
* End licensing of healthcare professionals.

1) This would make healthcare more expensive and could cause my employer to reduce coverage through our group plan or drop it all together2) This would cause a flight of insurance companies to flee